Have you ever felt like you were sleeping even when awake? That while your body is moving in a long-time automatic routine, your mind is de facto immobile? This is the way I felt until about a month ago, when I was steam-rolled by life time and time again and I thought all creative activities would be out of reach for me for a long time to come. Then, less than fifteen days ago, I started an experiment which turned out to be an immediate success: reading four books at the same time without getting crazy, without giving up, without forgetting. These reading sessions which I run through out the day – something I was not able to do since I was in school – seem to have CPRed the creative part of my brains. I have not seen any miracles yet and my novels have not suddenly written themselves on their own, but I can already feel my synapsis bubbling in their progress towards healing!

The experiment

For some months I have been dealing with my mom and other relatives who are damaged and worn out in various parts of their not-so-young bodies. Even before this, I was not a stranger to cleaning and other house chores, of course, but certainly my already awful lot of work has become even larger recently and as a result gone is the time I could dedicate to anything else not included in the 3 sacred priorities:1. “Keep mom tied to her bed” (mission failed: barely out of a long recovery, she was able to break a toe!);2. “Keep everything neat and tied at home as mom wants” (and, I confess, as I want it, too);3. “Pupils and any smallest job implying some income” (because it is not much but it is all I can do).
At the beginning of my mother’s recovery, while my synapis demanded in despair: “literature!” like a parched man in the desert craving water, I finally remembered the existence of my audiobook treasure. Amazingly, once the time for reading and writing vanished, a lot of time suddenly appeared at my disposal to listen to audiobooks and podcasts. While my hands iron tablecloths and my father’s danged shirts, Richard Armitage’s wonderful voice hooks me with novelizations of Shakespeare’s work; while I make the beds and vacuum the whole flat, he whispers at full volume love poems and classics into my ears; and while I cook lunches and dinners delegating to my muscular memory, my mind focuses on heinous murders and sensible detectives or some strange spy-like stories, which for some reason seem to all be linked to Russia!
Undeniably, this devouring of audiobooks was the trigger for my experiment, a sort of “CPR intervention” for my dying synapsis. Besides one audiobook which usually accompanies me for the whole week, I have started another three books, two Italian ones in “paper and ink” and a digital one in English. I read some twenty pages of each Italian every day, usually in the morning and evening while I wait for my Zantac to dissolve in the glass. The English one instead – which is a bit of a cheat since I am reading the original version of a book I know almost by heart in its Italian translation and about which I will soon write on this blog – takes all the time I can get after lunch. On Sunday, all these weekday books are put aside to leave space for romance, one novel I finish by the end of the day, chewing it little by little whenever I can take some me-time – a guilty pleasure I yield to to revive my heart, too, forever mourning the exile of chocolate from my life.

The results

I’m mad, I told myself. I will never succeed and will give up immediately like other times. And instead… Not only am I finishing (and maybe will have finished by the time this article is out) all four books in little more than ten days, even the e-book I had dragged on for months, but I have also proved to myself some important things.1. I am still able to be disciplined. I have never missed one “reading session”, no matter how constantly busy my days are. I have applied to this the same discipline I use to respect my diet, necessary to my body’s health, that discipline I hope to soon apply to my writing, too, and that deserts me instead every time I try to do some stretching or yoga or whatever other physical exercise. After all, I am moving around a lot these days – yes, I know, house chores are not the same as gym, but my eyes and other damaged parts of my body cannot really take anything more. By the way, the scheduled reading sessions which are relatively short seem to be agreeable to my eyes which do not show any sign of rebellion, though already quite tired on their own. It is enough to keep the sessions shorter with paperbacks and then the poor ones leave me more time with the e-book, with the right light and a circa-180-pixel font…2. My synapsis work. Every time I go back to one of the books, I can remember precisely where I had left the story, what I felt in the previous scene, who the characters are, even their names (which I usually forget). And as regards the books for which I cannot immediately take notes about – above all the audiobooks – I have found out I have a special drawer which keeps what I think while listening or reading and gives it back to me on Sunday, when I’m relaxing and I can write down my thoughts more easily.3. Every room in my house is a safe harbour. Like when I was a child, I read and above all write everywhere; every corner is filled with books, appliances, slips of paper and pens. With my synapsis being now happier, alive and lively, the plots which had hidden, waiting for me to look for them, are back up and ready for me to record even in bits and pieces, not yet organised, though more patient now that they know I have not completely forgotten them. Novels and short stories which had lost any hope can now see the light at the end of the dark and scary tunnel named “forced writer’s block”.4. The crumbles of joy remain with me all day long, above all when I feel like crying or screaming. They remind me the existence of other worlds, other imaginations, other problems and other solutions. They keep me happy, alive and lively just like my synapsis.
If you want to follow my experiment and see how I am proceeding, you can go on my GoodReads profile. I will soon add some short comments there on the books I have finished and then some longer here on the blog in a new category, #Bookshots.